Monitoring food and health news -- with particular attention to fads, fallacies and the "obesity" war

Summary of findings to date: Everything you can possibly eat or drink is both bad and good for you

"Let me have men about me that are fat... Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look ... such men are dangerous." -- Shakespeare

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

The rotten truth: Why 'fruit sugar' is one of the most damaging ingredients in our food (?)

There is a rehash of the old fructose scare below but most of the research appears to be epidemiological. I can see no evidence of harm from double-blind studies. That the most naturally-occurring form of sugar is bad for you seems crazy. It's amusing the number of bad things it is said to cause. See here, here and here for some skeptical articles

Sweet, cheap and natural — fructose sounds like the ideal ‘healthy’ sweetener. However, the sugar, which is found naturally in fruit but is now added to many processed foods, may hide a range of deadly secrets.

Scientists are discovering that fructose appears to be linked to serious modern epidemics such as cancers, heart disease, hypertension, kidney damage and even dementia.

The latest fears were raised last week by research that found people who consume lots of fructose by drinking fruit juice have an increased risk of rectal cancer. The research, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, suggests that the high content of fructose in processed fruit juice may be the trigger.

The problem, the researchers say, is that many substances found in fruit which help protect against bowel cancer — such as fibre, vitamin C and other antioxidants — are lost during processing.

There have been other concerns about the fructose content of fruit juice. Earlier this year, scientists at Bangor University warned that even freshly-squeezed juice contains up to five teaspoons of fructose per glass, which may lead to weight gain or even diabetes.

The British Dietetic Association says that because of this we should drink only one 150ml glass of juice a day. It warns: ‘Although fruit juice is natural, it has had all the fibre squeezed out of it and so the fructose is easily absorbed into the bloodstream.’

If only keeping one’s consumption of fructose down to safe daily levels were that straightforward. Nowadays, fructose is cropping up not just in fruit juice, where it occurs naturally, but in all sorts of foods and drinks — from biscuits to ice cream.

Most consumers wouldn’t know: it can be listed in the ingredients under a variety of names. The most common name for industrially produced versions is high-fructose corn syrup. It is a processed form of fructose derived basically from corn.

In the UK, it is replacing beet and cane sugar, because it’s cheap and keeps foods moist, boosting shelf life. It adds texture to food such as cereal bars and biscuits, making them chewy, and thickens ice cream and yoghurt drinks.

High-fructose-corn syrup is used in frozen products, too, as it reduces crystallisation. Another benefit is that it turns baked products an appetising brown, so you can often find it in cakes, pastries and bread rolls, crackers and cereals.

It’s easy to see why manufacturers of food and drink love corn syrup — and are using so much of it. A low-fat, fruit-flavoured yoghurt, for instance, can harbour ten teaspoons of the fructose-based sweetener in one pot. A can of soft drink can contain as much as 13 teaspoons.

Scientists are now growing increasingly worried about fructose syrup’s health effects, because although it contains around the same number of calories as cane sugar, the body does not metabolise fructose syrup in the same way. It places a far greater load on the liver, which, in turn, prompts a range of problems, including raised levels of fat in the bloodstream.

In August, a U.S. study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that adults who consumed high fructose corn syrup in fizzy drinks for two weeks as 25 per cent of their daily calorie requirement had increased blood levels of cholesterol and fats called triglycerides, which are linked to an increased risk of heart disease.

Fructose may also cause liver damage, the U.S. study found. As Dr Kimber Stanhope, who led the study, explains: ‘Fructose overloads the liver. It then gets turned into liver fat, which then increases blood triglycerides, cholesterol and the risk of cardiovascular disease.’

She adds that fructose may also increase the risk of diabetes in this way. ‘The extra liver fat may cause the increased insulin resistance we see in people consuming fructose.’ Insulin resistance is linked to a higher risk of diabetes.

Fructose may also make you more prone to obesity. For example, laboratory research by Princeton University this year concluded that ‘long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup resulted in abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen’. Such abdominal fat may raise your risk of heart disease and stroke.

Professor Bart Hoebel, who led the study, says: ‘Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different to other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true.’

High blood pressure is another danger, say researchers at Imperial College, London. The study, published in the journal Hypertension earlier this year, showed that people’s blood pressure rose significantly for every extra sweetened drink they consumed per day.

Dr Ian Brown, one of the researchers, says fructose may reduce nitric oxide levels in the bloodstream. This chemical is vital for keeping blood vessels healthily dilated.

Professor Richard Johnson, who led the University of Colorado study, was moved by the seriousness of this result to declare: ‘Excessive fructose intake should be considered an environmental toxin with major health implications.’

Perhaps even more worrying, research by Cambridge University suggests fructose may be helping to fuel rising levels of dementia.

Laboratory studies have linked high intakes of fructose with the formation of beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of animals. These plaques are frequently seen in people with Alzheimer’s.

In the U.S., concerns over risks of high fructose corn syrup have led to it being branded ‘the devil’s candy’ — even Michelle Obama has declared she doesn’t want her daughters eating it.

In response, its makers, the Corn Refiners Association, are trying to rebrand high fructose corn syrup as ‘corn sugar’. This attempt to camouflage the product has prompted a high-level legal case in the U.S. courts —launched by makers of traditional cane-sugar sucrose who don’t want to be sullied by high-fructose corn syrup’s worsening reputation.

However, British health authorities seem unworried and unwilling to accept responsibility. The Food Standards Agency says: ‘The syrup is not classed as an additive. It’s just thick sugar. It’s not even classed as a novel food, so it is an issue about nutrition rather than food safety.’ The agency says any food-safety concerns should be the Department of Health’s responsibility. But the latter says the former should be regulating it.

Is an obsession with natural birth putting mothers and babies in danger?

There is no doubt that for most women in this country, childbirth remains a safe and happy experience. But it is also true that for too many, it is a highly risky and frankly horrific experience.

Stories abound of mothers-to-be left alone in labour, sometimes refused pain relief or surgical intervention, putting their babies’ health or even lives in danger.

The statistics make grisly reading: an average of 11 babies are stillborn every day in NHS hospitals, according to research published recently in The Lancet.

Unlike other high-income countries, it’s a figure that has remained largely unchanged over the past ten years — putting Britain on a par with Belarus and Estonia.

More than £27 million in compensation was paid in 2008 by London hospitals alone for childbirth cases. Indeed, a shocking 60 per cent of all payments made by the NHS Litigation Authority relate to obstetrics.

In June this year, an unprecedented police investigation was launched into the deaths of five babies and two mothers at Furness General Hospital in Cumbria. And last weekend it was revealed another baby’s death at the hospital is also to be looked into. So what is going on?

Midwives point to an understaffed, overstretched system dealing with both a rising birth rate and a growing number of more complicated deliveries as a result of obesity, older mothers and multiple births.

The Royal College of Midwives warned last week that existing ‘massive midwife shortages’ will soon worsen as maternity hospitals face ‘falling budgets and pressure to cut staff further, despite a rapidly rising birth rate’.

Yet experts are far from convinced that falling budgets and staff shortages are the only reason for the obstetric scandals that have mired the reputation of UK maternity healthcare. Take the tragic case of 26-year-old health care assistant Liza Brady, whose son Alex was delivered in September 2008 stillborn at Furness General with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around his neck.

At 11lb 13oz, Alex was exceptionally large, yet midwives refused her request for a Caesarean — despite this having been suggested by a consultant obstetrician whom she saw during her pregnancy. During a long and painful labour, the midwives persistently refused her plea to be seen by a doctor and delayed the delivery even though the machine monitoring the baby’s heart showed he was in distress. ‘A doctor offered to help as he came on duty, but he was shooed away by the midwives who said he wasn’t needed,’ recalls Liza.

Prabas Misra, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the hospital, was so appalled by Liza’s care that he expressed ‘grave concerns’ about her case in a letter to hospital colleagues. He condemned as ‘indefensible’ the midwives’ claim that the foetal heart rate had been normal, since they’d admitted being unable to pick up the heart rate because of positioning of the monitor.

Summing up, Mr Misra wrote of ‘the risk of trying to make every labour and delivery normal and natural, and not thinking laterally (about) possible complications. I am all for having a natural childbirth — but not at any cost’.

Although talking about a specific case, Mr Misra has put his finger on an issue at the root of the problems in obstetrics today: the dangerous myth, promulgated by some midwives, that natural childbirth is not only the kindest form of delivery but also invariably the safest.

For years, the prevailing view among some leading figures in midwifery was that obstetricians were little better than trouble-makers. They were seen as over medicalising the natural process of childbirth, slowing down labour with their foetal heart rate monitors, and so increasing the risk of complications. It became something of a turf war.

‘These people need a job to do — and, too often, it’s taking over from the midwives and reducing their autonomy,’ said Professor Caroline Flint, a former president of the Royal College of Midwives as she opened a new midwife-led unit in 1997.

Yet while public attitudes might have changed — as seen in the rise in the numbers of women asking for Caesareans — this view that natural delivery is the only way is still influential in the midwifery world.

The NHS Institute for Innovation & Improvement’s guidance for midwives, for instance, instructs them to ‘focus on normal birth and reduce the Caesarean rate’. Doctors, it says, should ‘only enter the room of a labouring woman when asked to review (the patient) by a midwife’.

And despite objections from obstetricians, the RCM’s high-profile Campaign For Normal Birth has the slogan: ‘Intervention and Caesarean shouldn’t be the first choice — they should be the last.’

James Drife, a retired obstetrician and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Leeds University, comments: ‘It’s difficult to see exactly who the RCM is campaigning against. Every woman would like a normal birth, but the real fear is of a bad outcome.

‘To prevent that happening, we need co-operation between all the professionals in the obstetric team, rather than campaigns about which treatment is best. Without such co-operation, there is a far greater risk of mistakes being made.’

Gill Edwards, a leading clinical negligence solicitor with the firm Pannone, is in no doubt why these fatal mistakes continue. ‘Too often, we see a desire for autonomy, sometimes verging on arrogance, on the part of some midwives,’ she says. ‘It leads them to ignore National Midwifery Council rules that require them to call on the skills of other health professionals whenever something happens which is outside their sphere of practice.’

Of course, the vast majority of midwives do a superb job and their professionalism is not comprised by rivalry with doctors or dogmatic views about natural birth. However, for a minority this is not always the case.

‘Some of our worst cases occur because the drive to achieve a “normal” delivery clouds the judgment of midwives about when to call in specialist help from an obstetrician, or for a paediatrician to be present at the birth to assist with resuscitation when there are signs of foetal distress during labour,’ says Ms Edwards.

Last month, NHS watchdog the Care Quality Commission highlighted the lack of ‘a joined-up approach to working together’ as a major risk factor at Furness General Hospital. The coroner who looked at Alex Brady’s death put it more simply: ‘I don’t believe the doctors integrated. The midwives ran the show.’

The criminal investigation into the hospital was launched after a coroner’s report on the death of ten-day-old Joshua Titcombe in July 2008 as a result of a serious lung infection.

The inquest had heard that his parents, Hoa and James, had urged midwives to treat their son for an infection for which Hoa had been given antibiotics — but were told there was no need for the baby to see a doctor.

The coroner’s report was damning, finding ‘no integration between the midwifery and paediatric teams’, alongside ‘a failure to record fully or at all many of the factors which, taken together, might have led to a greater degree of suspicion or a referral to a paediatrician’.

It wasn’t the first such case. In July 2008, Nittaya Henrickson and her newborn son, Chester, both died at the hospital after she suffered an amniotic fluid embolism, where fluid from the amniotic sac escapes into the mother’s bloodstream. It’s a leading cause of maternal death, but the baby normally survives provided it is delivered promptly by Caesarean.

At an inquest in July 2009, Chester’s father, Carl, described how he pleaded with the midwives to get a doctor after he felt his wife die in his arms — but was told she had only fainted and that no doctors were needed to deliver the baby.

But while the scale of the problems at Furness are unprecedented, the evidence suggests the nature of the problems is far from unique. Last month, Laura Newman, 21, told how her baby died, aged nine days, after being starved of oxygen during the birth at Sandwell Hospital in the West Midlands last December.

‘Not only was the midwife extremely rude and dismissive to Laura and her family, but when it was clear that something was wrong and the baby needed to be urgently delivered, the midwife ignored the warning signs,’ says Jenna Harris, of Irwin Mitchell solicitors, who is representing Laura.

Laura herself has urged ‘every expectant woman to make sure the midwife makes regular checks during labour. It doesn’t make any difference whether you had a healthy pregnancy or not; things can go wrong at the last minute.’

The failure by some midwives not to monitor the baby correctly is another major factor in baby injury and death. Some midwives are resistant to monitoring in the belief it is another step to over-medicalising birth.

Electronic foetal monitoring is designed to provide healthcare professionals with continuous information on the foetal heartbeat and uterine contractions. It is seen as a major defence against stillbirth or neurological damage.

Yet mistakes made in the use of the technology are a major contributing factor to babies being damaged during birth (leading to cerebral palsy and other problems) or dying, says Edwin Chandraharan, senior consultant obstetrician at St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust, London.

Mr Chandraharan recently pointed out: ‘A 1997 report highlighted that substandard care, especially with regard to CTG (cardiotocography or fetal monitoring) contributed to over 50 per cent of deaths during labour and birth. Unfortunately, more than decade later, (there is) a continuing problem of CTG misinterpretation.’

Last year, the Birth Trauma Association made a Freedom of Information request about obstetric cases going through the courts, and found that of 1,040 cases a large proportion related to failure to monitor the baby properly during labour.

‘While there are excellent maternity services, there are also some that are fragmented, dysfunctional and occasionally unsafe,’ says the association’s Maureen Treadwell. ‘For instance, despite evidence to the contrary, some midwives still believe using electronic monitoring on women considered to be at risk during childbirth is unhelpful because it makes medical intervention more likely. Simply having more midwives won’t change that.’

So what will? A start could be universal acknowledgement that no matter how much a woman longs for a normal delivery, ‘things can go wrong at the last minute’ — as Laura Newman put it.

And that recognition needs to start with antenatal information provided by midwives, which, according to Mrs Treadwell, is too often too rosy. ‘Women have the right to honest, objective information of what can go wrong, and what their choices are, and midwives have an ethical duty to provide that information,’ she says.

Such assessments have to be evidence-based. ‘Some midwives still suggest it’s equally safe to have a normal delivery with a breech baby, even though the evidence Caesareans are safest for breech births is overwhelming.’

Where it is not bunk is when it shows that some treatment or influence has no effect on lifespan or disease incidence. It is as convincing as disproof as it is unconvincing as proof. Think about it. As Einstein said: No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Epidemiological studies are useful for hypothesis-generating or for hypothesis-testing of theories already examined in experimental work but they do not enable causative inferences by themselves

The standard of reasoning that one commonly finds in epidemiological journal articles is akin to the following false syllogism:
Chairs have legs
You have legs
So therefore you are a chair

I am rather in despair that important medical research is plagued by arrant nonsense. The simple truth that correlation is not causation seems unknown to most medical writers. As a last ditch attempt to get that truth into a few more skulls let me be "offensive". Offensiveness may serve to get the matter noticed. So here is the story: There is about a -.5 correlation between lip size and IQ. Big lips predict low IQ. Your run-of-the mill medical researcher will pounce on that as a huge breakthrough in finding the causes of IQ -- and propound new theories about things such as blood circulation to explain how lips affect IQ. But that is nonsense. Big lips are mostly found on people of African ancestry and, as all the studies attest, Africans are a very low IQ group. The correlation arises because of heredity, not lip size. There is a third factor behind the correlation -- and the possibility of such third factors seems to be a jaw-dropping surprise to most medical researchers

SALT -- SALT -- SALT

1). A good example of an epidemiological disproof concerns the dreaded salt (NaCl). We are constantly told that we eat too much salt for good health and must cut back our consumption of it. Yet there is one nation that consumes huge amounts of salt. So do they all die young there? Quite the reverse: Japan has the world's highest concentration of centenarians. Taste Japan's favourite sauce -- soy sauce -- if you want to understand Japanese salt consumption. It's almost solid salt.

2). We need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. So the conventional wisdom is not only wrong. It is positively harmful

3). Table salt is a major source of iodine, which is why salt is normally "iodized" by official decree. Cutting back salt consumption runs the risk of iodine deficiency, with its huge adverse health impacts -- goiter, mental retardation etc. GIVE YOUR BABY PLENTY OF SALTY FOODS -- unless you want to turn it into a cretin

4). Our blood has roughly the same concentration of salt as sea-water so claims that the body cannot handle high levels of salt were always absurd

5). The latest academic study shows that LOW salt in your blood is most likely to lead to heart attacks. See JAMA. 2011;305(17):1777-1785. More here and here and here for similar findings. Salt is harmless but a deficiency of it is not. We need it. See also here

PEANUTS: There is a vaccination against peanut allergy -- peanuts themselves. Give peanut products (e.g. peanut butter -- or the original "Bamba" if you have Israeli contacts) to your baby as soon as it begins to take solid foods and that should immunize it for life. See here and here (scroll down). It's also likely that a mother who eats peanuts while she is lactating may confer some protection on her baby. See here

THE SIDE-EFFECT MANIA. If a drug is shown to have troublesome side-effects, there are always calls for it to be banned or not authorized for use in the first place. But that is insane. ALL drugs have side effects. Even aspirin causes stomach bleeding, for instance -- and paracetamol (acetaminophen) can wreck your liver. If a drug has no side effects, it will have no main effects either. If you want a side-effect-free drug, take a homeopathic remedy. They're just water.

Although I am an atheist, I have never wavered from my view that the New Testament is the best guide to living and I still enjoy reading it. Here is what the apostle Paul says about vegetarians: "For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth." (Romans 14: 2.3). What perfect advice! That is real tolerance: Very different from the dogmatism of the food freaks. Interesting that vegetarianism is such an old compulsion, though.

Even if we concede that getting fat shortens your life, what right has anybody got to question someone's decision to accept that tradeoff for themselves? Such a decision could be just one version of the old idea that it is best to have a short life but a merry one. Even the Bible is supportive of that thinking. See Ecclesiastes 8:15 and Isaiah 22: 13. To deny the right to make such a personal decision is plainly Fascistic.

Obesity does NOT causes diabetes. But insatiable eating is a prominent symptom of diabetes. So diabetes DOES cause obesity, which accounts for the correlation between the two things. The streets are full of fatties who don't have diabetes. How come? If conventional medical theory were correct we should be in the midst of an epidemic of diabetes. A recent high quality study has also found that fatties are LESS likely to die of diabetes

Elite people frequently express disapproval of red meat eating as a way of expressing their felt superiority to the ordinary people who eat it

IQ: Political correctness makes IQ generally unmentionable so it is rarely controlled for in epidemiological studies. This is extremely regrettable as it tends to vitiate findings that do not control for it. When it is examined, it is routinely found to have pervasive effects. We read, for instance, that "The mother's IQ was more highly predictive of breastfeeding status than were her race, education, age, poverty status, smoking, the home environment, or the child's birth weight or birth order". So political correctness can render otherwise interesting findings moot

"To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact" -- Charles Darwin

"Most men die of their remedies, not of their diseases", said Moliere. That may no longer be true in general but there is still a lot of false medical "wisdom" around that does harm to various degrees -- the statin and antioxidant fads, for instance. And showing its falsity is rarely the problem. The problem is getting people -- medical researchers in particular -- to abandon their preconceptions

Bertrand Russell could have been talking about today's conventional dietary "wisdom" when he said: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

The challenge, as John Maynard Keynes knew, "lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones".

"Obesity" is 77% genetic. So trying to make fatties slim is punishing them for the way they were born. That sort of thing is furiously condemned in relation to homosexuals so why is it OK for fatties?

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Some more problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize dietary fat. But Eskimos living on their traditional diet eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. At any given age they in fact have an exceptionally LOW incidence of cardiovascular disease. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

11). A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

12. Fascism: "What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum. What a fine fellow!

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Trans fats: For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The "antioxidant" religion: The experimental evidence is that antioxidants SHORTEN your life, if anything. Studies here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance. That they are of benefit is a great theory but it is one that has been coshed by reality plenty of times.

The medical consensus is often wrong. The best known wrongheaded medical orthodoxy is that stomach ulcers could not be caused by bacteria because the stomach is so acidic. Disproof of that view first appeared in 1875 (Yes. 1875) but the falsity of the view was not widely recognized until 1990. Only heroic efforts finally overturned the consensus and led to a cure for stomach ulcers. See
here and here and here.

Dieticians are just modern-day witch-doctors. There is no undergirding in double-blind studies for their usual recommendations

The fragility of current medical wisdom: Would you believe that even Old Testament wisdom can sometimes trump medical wisdom? Note this quote: "Spiess discussed Swedish research on cardiac patients that compared Jehovah's Witnesses who refused blood transfusions to patients with similar disease progression during open-heart surgery. The research found those who refused transfusions had noticeably better survival rates.

Medical wisdom can in fact fly in the face of the known facts. How often do we hear reverent praise for the Mediterranean diet? Yet both Australians and Japanese live longer than Greeks and Italians, despite having very different diets. The traditional Australian diet is in fact about as opposite to the Mediterranean diet as you can get. The reverence for the Mediterranean diet can only be understood therefore as some sort of Anglo-Saxon cultural cringe. It is quite brainless. Why are not the Australian and Japanese diets extolled if health is the matter at issue?

Since many of my posts here make severe criticisms of medical research, I should perhaps point out that I am also a severe critic of much research in my own field of psychology. See here and here

This is NOT an "alternative medicine" site. Perhaps the only (weak) excuse for the poorly substantiated claims that often appear in the medical literature is the even poorer level of substantiation offered in the "alternative" literature.

I used to teach social statistics in a major Australian university and I find medical statistics pretty obfuscatory. They seem uniformly designed to make mountains out of molehills. Many times in the academic literature I have excoriated my colleagues in psychology and sociology for going ga-ga over very weak correlations but what I find in the medical literature makes the findings in the social sciences look positively muscular. In fact, medical findings are almost never reported as correlations -- because to do so would exhibit how laughably trivial they generally are. If (say) 3 individuals in a thousand in a control group had some sort of an adverse outcome versus 4 out of a thousand in a group undergoing some treatment, the difference will be published in the medical literature with great excitement and intimations of its importance. In fact, of course, such small differences are almost certainly random noise and are in any rational calculus unimportant. And statistical significance is little help in determining the importance of a finding. Statistical significance simply tells you that the result was unlikely to be an effect of small sample size. But a statistically significant difference could have been due to any number of other randomly-present factors.

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

The Truth About Ancel Keys. Keys was a brilliant man but his concentration on heart disease misled him. He was right that high fat intake predicted high rates of heart disease (though it was ANIMAL fat in particular that was the "culprit") but he overlooked that the same intake predicted LESS mortality from other causes. The same narrow vision led him to be the earliest prominent advocate of the "Mediterranean diet" hypothesis. It's true that Mediterraneans have less heart disease but they have more of other causes of death, so that Mediterranean countries do not have particularly long lifespans when compared with other developed countries. If there are any lessons about diet to be learned from lifespans, it is un-Mediterranean countries like Australia and the Nordic countries that one should look to.

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could have been speaking of the prevailing health "wisdom" of today when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

Improbable events do happen at random -- as mathematician John Brignell notes rather tartly: "Consider, instead, my experiences in the village pub swindle. It is based on the weekly bonus ball in the National Lottery. It so happens that my birth date is 13, so that is the number I always choose. With a few occasional absences abroad I have paid my pound every week for a year and a half, but have never won. Some of my neighbours win frequently; one in three consecutive weeks. Furthermore, I always put in a pound for my wife for her birth date, which is 11. She has never won either. The probability of neither of these numbers coming up in that period is less than 5%, which for an epidemiologist is significant enough to publish a paper.

Kids are not shy anymore. They are "autistic". Autism is a real problem but the rise in its incidence seems likely to be the product of overdiagnosis -- the now common tendency to medicalize almost all problems.

One of the great pleasures in life is the first mouthful of cold beer on a hot day -- and the food Puritans can stick that wherever they like

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here